Digital Project Manager Interview Questions

How Do You Handle Conflict Within Your Team

Conflicts are inevitable, but it does not necessarily have to be destructive. The problem is not that the conflict exists, but how you choose to handle it. When approached positively, conflict promotes diverse ideas. Every conflict is unique, so there is no one-size-fits-all approach to handling them all. There are several aspects that go into determining which strategy is ideal for settling conflicts.

To properly respond to this question, assure the interviewer that you are a good listener who can accept conflicting viewpoints without being offended. Start by having an informal meeting with each team member to settle disputes within the team. Rather than making assumptions, it is preferable to listen to peoples concerns in a secure environment. Find the source of the conflict and work to resolve it while keeping everyones best interests in mind.

What Was A Challenging Project And How Did You Manage It

This behavioral question takes the conversation from the theoretical to the practical. You can see how the project managers responded to real-life problems, which helps you determine how they would manage projects at your organization. This question also provides a sense of the persons project management experience, such as how they lead teams and deal with conflicts. By asking about a challenging project, you can see how they apply their hard and soft skills when pushed to their limits and beyond.

How Do You Ensure You And Your Team Deliver Or Exceed Customer Expectations

In a nutshell, the interviewer wants to see how, in detail, youre able to succeed as a project manager. After all, meeting customer expectations when it comes to project delivery is your ultimate goal. Its important not to be vague and give a generalized answer youll want to give precise examples and details about your process.

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How Should You Handle A Difficult Stakeholder Involved In Your Project

Here are some points to remember to handle a difficult stakeholder in your project:

• Accept their authority without arguing
• Do not show any negative emotion
• Try to understand their problem
• You can ask for their advice and listen to them
• Be honest with the decisions you make
• Try to praise them whenever possible and try to create the connection
• Enhance your communication

What Are Your Weaknesses

Another tricky one. The purpose of this question is to see how you view and evaluate yourself.

One the one hand, if you suggest you dont have any weaknesses, your interviewer will almost certainly see you as a lair, egotistical, or both.

Dont fall into the trap of trying to present a positive skill in disguise as a weakness, like I work too hard or I am a perfectionist. Any experienced interviewer will see through this in a heartbeat.

Additionally, revealing that Im not really a morning person and have been known to come in late raises immediate and obvious red flags.

The trick here is to respond realistically by mentioning a small, work related weakness and what you are doing or have done to overcome it.

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Have You Ever Had A Project That Did Not Meet The Deadline Or Budget

Missing the deadline or budget are two common issues that project managers encounter. Here, you can show how you handle project setbacks. You can use the

• Situation: Explain the issue in a positive, constructive way.

• Task: Explain your role in the situation.

• Action: Explain what you did to resolve or address the situation.

• Result: Explain how your solution had a positive impact.

The STAR method allows you to clearly explain a real-life situation and how you overcame it.

Example:I was working on a project with a client, and they wanted to add a certain feature to their custom software that would put them over the allocated time. As the project manager, I needed to decide whether we should add this feature and miss our deadline or spend less time on another part of the project.

I met with my team to understand how much time it would take to add the feature. Once I had a very thorough answer for the client, I presented them with the options. They decided that they would accept a later deadline for the feature. We ended up delivering the finished product a month later than the original deadline, but the client was happy with the outcome.

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Ideal: Opinionated And Flexible

Some of the questions here are trick questions. For instance, most agencies do a mix of Agile and Waterfallrather than 100% one or the other. And the ideal answer to #7 is: It depends on the particular clients priorities rather than one of the three.

You want someone who is opinionatedsince being a PM is primarily about getting results through other people, so they often need to persuade the team to do thingsbut they also need to be flexible. If someone is dead-set on a single approach or methodology, it may be a sign theyll have trouble adapting to changes that are inevitable at agencies.

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How Do You Work With Sponsors How Do You Manage Up

Managing up is a topic Iâd expect to see covered in a list of senior project manager interview questions, but itâs appropriate to ask for any level.

Reason to ask:Managing up means working well with people more senior than you. Project managers do this all the time, so itâs good to find out how they make those relationships work.

Candidate notes: The type of projects you have worked on will have shaped your experience with senior managers and sponsors. Explain the project management role you had and how that related to the relevant executives. Your working style will necessarily be different because sponsors work in different ways, and itâs OK to acknowledge that.

Bad response: âI prefer not to get my sponsor involved. Theyâre typically a figurehead, so I donât bother them.â

What Is The Meaning Of The Project Life Cycle

The product life cycle is summarized as a concept that tracks the duration of a project. It starts with the ideation and research related to the project and ends with its execution. Being an IT project manager, you should be equipped to answer this interview question that tests your project-related knowledge.

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Project Management Scenario Based Questions And Answers For Interview

Once youâve gone through your common interview questions that probe skills, as a hiring manager, youâll want to ask scenario-based questions.

These are relatively easy to come up with by yourself. For example:

• Give the candidate information about a recent project and ask them to advise on what the next steps should be.
• Give the candidate a list of tasks and ask them to create a project schedule.
• Ask the candidate to do a short presentation on how they would tackle a project challenge â use an example of a tricky situation you have had recently.
• Provide a brief on a recent project towards the point of closure and ask the candidate to give you an overview of how they would close the project.

The benefit of using examples you are familiar with from your own business instead of made-up examples you found online is that you can compare what the candidate says with what actually happened.

Are they close? Could their plans be a realistic way to take the project to the next step?

What Challenges Do You Think You Would Face While Incorporating While Handling The Change Requests

The three most critical challenges that arise when handling change requests are:

• Most of the time, CR is raised informally by stakeholders.
• It becomes difficult for a project manager or team to turn down a change request.
• There is a perpetual battle between the group members and stakeholders over the importance of change requests.

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Questions To Ask Digital Project Manager Candidates

Recruiting for and interviewing Digital Project Managers is a tricky thing. The main reason for this is, despite our digital industry becoming mature in many ways, the digital project management side of things is still relatively new in terms of speciality.

My first tip would be to apply extreme negative feedback tactics in any interview DING DING DING!

But if you think your HR department may have an issue with this approach, read on

Finding a good and experienced Account Manager isnt to difficult and these folk can expertly handle clients, likewise, its getting comparatively easier to find creative and technology specialists such as UX Designers and Mobile Developers however when it comes to digital project management there still seems to be a little bit of a gap finding people who can not just manage projects, but manage digital projects.

The reason for this I believe is because a Digital Project Manager really needs to understand the complexities of digital projects in order to run them well, and although not necessary, having experience in a wide range of digital skills is advantageous.

However, as well as being experienced to some extent in digital production, its still vitally important that a Digital Project Manager also has commercial awareness, business acumen and more traditional skills associated with project management and account management its finding people with this mix that seems to prove especially challenging.

How Will You Identify Bad Project Ideas As An Agile Project Manager

Different opinions exist when you collaborate with others and you must take them into consideration before you decide. There will be a majority view that will be chosen because all decisions cannot be made by unanimous vote. There may be team members whose opinions differ and whose suggestions are useless for the project. It is important to handle this situation delicately so that no members feel excluded.

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How Do You Go About Managing The Performance Of Your Team

Its important to show that you have leadership skills when you answer this question. Be thorough about your daily tasks when it comes to managing your teams performancefor example, perhaps you hold weekly strategy discussions and meetings. Youll also want to provide specific examples of how your management style has resulted in positive team performance.

What Is The Difference Between Project Program And Portfolio

Project It is an effort to come up with a unique solution or product. It is temporary in nature and has a start and endpoint which are defined. The main focus is on detailed delivery.

Program It is a set of interrelated projects which are managed together. Just like a project, it is also temporary in nature but lasts longer. The program follows high-level plans that are backed up by many detailed plans.

Portfolio It is a bunch of projects as well as operations that are managed by one group so that the strategic goal can be achieved. Unlike project and program, it is permanent in nature and aligned with the strategic planning.

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Project Manager Interview Questions On Consistency And Integrity

Honesty and trustworthiness are of utmost importance in the world of business. Project managers manage critical responsibilities and resources such as material, money, and human resources. They also represent the organization to employees, customers, and vendors. They are role models for their team members. Any lack of consistency and integrity can cost the organization a lot more than money. Therefore, the key questions asked to the candidate will be:

Whats The Difference Between Project Monitoring And Controlling

Monitoring entails identifying discrepancies between actual project results and the project baseline, whereas Controlling entails identifying repair options for deviations and recommending corrective actions.

Both project monitoring and control are used to keep projects on track and carried out from start to finish. These procedures must be planned as part of the project management strategy for the project life cycle to go well.

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Project Manager Interview Questions To Explore Ethics Like

• Tell me about yourself. What would you like me to know about you? Whats unique about you?
• What was your most important contribution to your last team? And your employer?
• How will you improve the agency or business?
• How would you deal with a situation where your project is running behind because the resource youve booked is being used by another urgent project?
• How do you like to manage a team? How do you motivate them?
• How do you manage a project thats under-resourced?
• What would you do in a scenario where youve estimated for a project, and youre told you need to cut the costs?
• What was your biggest mistake? What did you learn from this? How did you make sure it wouldnt happen again?

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As an interviewer, youll need to assess in the project manager interview questions you ask, their response to being asked a more difficult scenario question where they have to think on their feet, and put under a bit of stress. Id be looking for creative responses, and a presentation of different options and ideas on how to resolve a problem or situation. Obviously, the extent to which you warm to them is important too!

How Should A Project Manager Inform His Team Of A Failure

Once the project manager has confirmed the failure, they must convene a meeting and directly state that the project was a failure. Rather than looking for someone to blame, the project manager must focus on the initiatives benefits. The projects learning outcomes should be discussed and recorded so that the project team and project manager may apply what theyve learned to future initiatives.

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What Is Raid In Project Management

RAID in project management stands for Risk, Assumptions, Issue, and Dependencies. These are very important items that a project manager must have knowledge about.

• Risks are the potential problems that can have either a positive or negative impact on the project resulting in a deviation of the final result from the original plan.
• Actions are the task that you perform throughout the project.
• Issues are the hurdles that you might face in the course of the project which must be successfully resolved or it might derail the project or cause the project to fail.
• are your choice of actions/tasks in the project.

What Project Management Software Do You Prefer

Most project managers depend largely on Gantt charts regarding project planning and scheduling. Award-winning online Gantt charts in ProjectManager allow project managers to plan every aspect of their projects. Managers may use one screen to build dependencies, set milestones, assign tasks, manage workload, and more. The capability of our planning tools would wow any general contractor you employ.

A project manager needs project management tools to plan, monitor, and report on a project. There are several options, ranging from simple to sophisticated. This question exposes, first and foremost, how current the candidate is with software and project management technologies. It also gives an overview of the tools and techniques they employ to manage a project.

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How To Schedule Your Exam After Completion Of Pmp Training

• Once your application has been approved, you will be given a year to schedule your PMP Exam.
• The exam can be scheduled up to three times during the eligibility period.
• Once you have been approved by PMI and paid the PMP certification exam fee, you can schedule your exam with Pearson VUE.
• You can find a complete list of testing locations on the Pearson VUE PMI page.

How Have You Improved Project Management Processes At Your Current Firm

Good because: Not everyone has the chance to work on business critical, exciting projects that make for a great CV, but everyone has the chance to offer some suggestions for improvements . Look for someone who has ideas and who isnt afraid to put them forward.

Bad response: Its all pretty rubbish there but I havent bothered to do anything about it as theres no point.

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What Are Some Big Project Challenges You’ve Faced And How Did You Address Them

All projects raise challenges, some of which can be significant. This question will help you understand how a candidate addresses challenges. It will provide insight into how the candidate identifies and resolves problems and communicates issues.

Interviewer tips

Encourage candidates to provide details about challenges they’ve encountered, the steps they took to deal will them and what the outcome was. Have them elaborate on the circumstances surrounding the issue. Be wary of candidates who focus primarily on blaming others for their problems. This question could prove to be one of the most informative ones you ask, so give it the time it needs.

An example of a good candidate answer

A couple years ago, I managed a large application development project that incorporated an existing credit card processing and storage system. Not long before the application was supposed to go live, we discovered that one of the steps in the credit card processing phase failed to protect the credit card numbers according to Payment Card Industry compliance standards. We found ourselves scrambling to find a resolution.

Operational And Situational Questions

• In three minutes maximum, tell me about a project you previously worked on. What were the deliverables of the project? What was the timeline? What was the budget?
• Tell me about a time you had to get buy-in on a project from multiple stakeholders. What methods did you use to persuade them?
• Describe a time a project fell behind on budget or time. What steps did you take to mitigate the situation?
• What are some of your preferred project management tools? What do you like about them? What are their limitations?
• What methodology do you use? Agile, something else? Describe a situation where it was necessary to deviate from the usual process. What did you do? What were the results?
• Describe a time you had to give a customer bad news. How did you deliver the news? How did they respond?
• Describe a time you worked with a team member who wasnt pulling their weight. How did you address this?
• Have you ever had to remove a person from your team? How did you explain this to the rest of the team?
• Have you ever disagreed with a team member? What was the issue? Describe and defend the opposing point of view.

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